I initially named one of my OpEdNews series 'White Privilege
Investigations.' I looked at the summary today, and it said:

This series of reflections
discusses the much-maligned notion of 'white privilege.' Is white privilege
just a conversation-stopper, or is it a genuinely helpful model for
understanding racial inequality and oppression? Is white privilege 'privilege
from' or 'privilege to,' and what does that even mean anyway? And does white
privilege manifest itself in commonly-expressed visions of history, e.g. the
'man of his time' fallacy?

I have felt uncomfortable
with the rather pompous sounding 'White Privilege Investigations' series title
for some time. So instead, I am renaming the series

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Racial Privilege is Mighty!

This is a title which is a little less feisty and less po-faced. I may
have 'problem glasses,' but I don't really wish to be seen as a
problem-glasses-wearer; particularly given my economic background and status.
So in keeping with this anti-elitist and anti-intellectual (but far from
anti-academic!) stance, I have now renamed the series, and also made a careful
selection of existing articles to add to the series in question (as well as rewording the introduction somewhat).

I think what is important here, in terms of reflexivity, are the following
insights:

1.
A purely theoretical account of racial privilege
is fine, but applying this notion to specific persons, such as the privileged
cosmopolitan, or the apologist for history's 'men of their time,' can help
bring out more clearly what is at issue in the notion.

2.
And in the case of the historical Universalism
and Relativism article, an ironic twist where I 'pretend' to hold the same kind
of views I am criticizing can also be very illustrative and provocating; rather
'defamiliarizing,' as it were.

3.
A serious account of racial privilege requires discussion of the 'respectable'
privilege, and not just the explicitly racist. I do find it interesting that
liberal interventionist and neocon thought are barely even 'privileged,' let
alone fully 'white supremacist' in the eyes of some; this needs to be
challenged. So the apparently anti- nationalist
globalist or cosmopolitan, as well as the dusty intellectual who 'gives every
man his due,' are similarly not above criticism.

4.
All this being said, I would like to zoom out
further into other forms of racial privilege. It is not difficult to think of
non-white forms of racial privilege. The experience of Rohingya in Myanmar,
Ainu and Koreans in Japan, or white farmers in Zimbabwe, shows that there is
nothing 'eternal' about the racial privilege of white people; keen attention to
historical nuance and context is extremely desirable, in order to create a
clearer picture of the wide array of privileged racial identities past and
present.